Meta-ethics

In Philosophy, Ethics is commonly divided into two branches, normative
ethics and meta-ethics. Normative ethics addresses questions such as "What
actions are good and bad?" and "What should we do?" Thus, a theory of
normative ethics will endorse some ethical evaluations. Meta-ethics, on the
other hand, seeks to understand the nature of ethical evaluations. Thus,
examples of meta-ethical questions include:

   * What does it mean to say something is "good"?
   * How, if at all, do we know what is right and wrong?
   * How do moral attitudes motivate action?
   * Are there objective values?

A meta-ethical theory, unlike a normative ethical theory, does not contain
any ethical evaluations (notice that an answer to any of the above four
questions would not itself be an ethical statement).

In the last century, the field of meta-ethics has been dominated by five
kinds of theories:

  1. Ethical intuitionism, which holds that there are objective, irreducible
     moral properties (such as the property of 'goodness'), and that we
     sometimes have intuitive awareness of moral properties or of moral
     truths.
  2. Ethical naturalism, which holds that there are objective moral
     properties, but that these properties are reducible. Most ethical
     naturalists hold that we have empirical knowledge of moral truths.
     Several have argued that moral knowledge can be gained by the same
     means as scientific knowledge.
  3. Ethical subjectivism, which holds that moral statements are made true
     or false by the attitudes and/or conventions of observers. An example
     of this is the view that for a thing to be morally right is just for it
     to be approved of by society; this leads to the view that different
     things are right in different societies.
  4. Non-cognitivism, which holds that ethical sentences are neither true
     nor false because they do not assert genuine propositions. Some have
     held that ethical sentences such as "Stealing is wrong" are merely
     expressions of emotion; others have argued that they are more like
     imperatives.
  5. Moral skepticism, which holds that ethical sentences are generally
     false. Moral skeptics hold that there are no objective values, but that
     the claim that there are objective values is part of the meaning of
     ordinary ethical sentences; that is why, in their view, ethical
     sentences are false.